12" Powerbooks, How about making music on 12" Powerbook? Options

[charlieb]

I have been waiting for a couple of months now to see what is best for me to buy in the Powerbook line. Making music is something I want to experiment with, it will not be my main thing to do.

I have been thinking of getting a 12" PB, and a 17" flat panel display.
60 Gigs hard drive, max Ram. Should this serve me well?
800 Firewire not a big deal?
Gigabit Ethernet not a big deal?

Thinking of buying Live, Reason, and Oxygen or Edirol, as was suggested.

As always, thanks in advance for your wisdom.

charlie

[rickenbacker]

Leave your Mac's hard drive to deal with the OS and the program you're using (SX, Logic, etc), while the external hard drive handles all your recording files. Also, get a 7,200rpm FireWire drive - most internal laptop hard drives are only 5,400, which isn't fast enough.

From other posts here, I wonder if you'll only be using Reason for the moment, so your files will be a lot smaller than if you were recording audio. Still, it's worth getting an external drive and setting up your system right from the start.

Do you need an extra 17" monitor, though? Surely the price of that on top of a 12" PowerBook would take you past the cost of the 15" PowerBook? Even though there's now the fantastically gorgeous and highly desirable 17" PowerBook, the 15" one is still plenty of screen.

Schoppito: for what it's worth, I use a 600MHz G3 iBook to record. I can get around 16 tracks of audio (some stereo) and a few more Midi, plus a couple of plug-ins on most tracks before I hit too many problems. With a G4 867MHz+, this should be well within your reach.